


weather it out

by wtfmulder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-13 13:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10514598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wtfmulder/pseuds/wtfmulder
Summary: Our pair fumble a few times before they get it right. A few drabbles that go together.





	1. climate change

_you should try it sometime_

Perhaps I’d been waiting for a sign: something powerful, a gift from earth itself arranging dirt and concrete and sand and wind into one giant arrow pointing directly at Fox Mulder. I forget that life isn’t always as theatrical as the past few years have led me to believe, that the truth isn’t always so elusive. Sometimes there is beauty in only a little rain.

I don’t know how to tell him exactly what he means to me, and I think he’d be afraid to hear it. This is a man who does and wallows later, whose actions so far proceed his thoughts you wonder if there isn’t some kind of neural dissonance that makes him this way. But tonight I will follow his lead. I am prepared to take the leap, perhaps the biggest one either of us have dared to take in the time we’ve known each other.

I told Sheila that it’s about realizing, suddenly and painfully, that you cannot see yourself with anyone else. You switch a flick and it’s written there, and I have _seen it_ reflected in his features, the way he touches me. This is it for us, Mulder. Who else could it be?

In one bed, he talks to me about Calabria, Italy, where in 1890, sun soaked villagers screamed and hid at the unlikely occurrence of blood pouring from the sky. Birds, he says with a morbid little smile. The winds were at an all time high and _snap_. He makes a twisting motion from where he’s propped against the headboard. I must look disturbed, because his smile falters.

I lean in and kiss it off his face.

Not even a kiss, Sheila had marveled. Trust me, the man knows how to kiss. He does. After a moment’s hesitation, a confused, adorable flail, he’s kissing back. It’s vengeful. His hands lock in my hair, his pillowy lips go hard and punchy. I am driven back to my side of the bed with the force of his passion. I feel it in every inch of me, every inch of him; we are straining, desperate, his tongue touches mine and it is warm and wet and so damn comfortable tears burn behind my eyelids. He is so close. I have wanted this so badly for so very long…

And then he is hauling himself away, and it feels more like tearing an I.V. needle out your arm than ripping off a bandaid. Back on his side of the bed his eyes are wild, and then they’re tender, and then they’re blank. And suddenly I know.

I’ve been presumptuous.

I gather myself from the bed while examining the evidence. His reaction when I tried to leave. His drug addled voice, made soft and low by his foray into drowning. Scully, I love you. But he had been drugged, and just now I had decidedly not been. I think of other times. Mothmen and lost opportunities. Not so much lost as rejected, I suppose. His face, hard and condescending as hell when I asked him to trust my judgment. For once, Mulder. Trust me like I’ve come to trust you. Maybe I thought he had.

“Scully…” he starts. Tossing my pillows on the cot, the one we’d both forgone after realizing how dreadfully uncomfortable it was, I look at him. My features are carefully schooled. I look okay. I look fine. He is pleading and wounded. “Scully, I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for.” Even I’m impressed with how plainly this comes out. The cot had been delivered with a blanket. I turn off the lamp and collapse into my new bed, and will the tears away. All of them. Every single one. Instead, I study the ceiling. “I’m the one who should be sorry, Mulder. I’m not sure what I was thinking.”

And I go to sleep, pretending not to notice him staring at me the whole night through.


	2. global warming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> drabble; pg-13; MSR; missing scene-Arcadia; sequel to climate change; Mulder makes his move, disregarding all the facts.

  
There are so many things to be angry about right now I can’t pick one to lull me into a fitful sleep. Diana’s a tired choice, but a classic. And Mulder’s sweet, oblivious cruelty on this case is too raw. If I remove the foreign objection from that puncture wound I’ll get blood all over the place.

Surprisingly I get stuck on his little CC & R’s comment. Perhaps the most innocuous but goddamnit, how does Mulder not know me after all of this time? It’s been six years and he still takes my ability to be nice to other people and fit into my surroundings as a personal affront. I gave up my six-figure paycheck and my regulation picket fence to chase aliens and trash monsters with his mopey, indecisive ass. Any planned community worth their weight in laminated guidebooks and zoysia sod would reject me outright.

And like a tulpa, conjured from the wickedness of my own hatred and fear and bitterness, he arrives shirtless and determined at the foot of my bed.

“Hey, you up?” I don’t answer, but he crawls in anyway. My jaw clenches. We had ordered a guest bed, too, his penchant for sad pornography and musty couches aside. If he thinks I’m going to let him in here…

His lips touch mine; they’re chapped, tasting of bitter orange from all of the juice he’d demanded from the operations team. It’s a good kiss. It’s not my kiss, not confident and knowing and a little sexy. It’s soft and hopeful. It’s a question, the kind you have to ask with a small voice and shaking hands.

I’m still angry.  
  
I go still underneath him. He’s a good agent, lives off of the skin of his dauntless intuition – he pulls back with a quickness, takes in the look on my face, and moves away from me with a sharp nod. I expect him to take his leave and lick his wounds, like he’d forced me to do all those months ago. But he doesn’t. He shuffles back against the headboard and basks in what I understand to be pretty intense hurt.

“I’m pretty bad at this,” he admits slowly. His jaw works like he’s trying to settle on an expression, but nothing satisfies. “In Kansas, you know…” he does a weird thing with his hands, worriedly licks at his lips. I don’t know. I do know I will never put myself out there again, not for him. “You big on second impressions, Scully?” He looks afraid of the truth for the first time since I’ve known him.

We thrive on this, on asking each other questions the other cannot answer. But here the thrill of it is achingly absent, and I am only left with one painful realization: that things buried deep sometimes ferment, but mostly they rot. Inevitability seems less and less inevitable after enough time has passed. I can’t help but wonder if maybe we’d left it too long, that too much has happened. I want to make myself feel it. It’d been so… nice. So pure and light, after a half-decade of doing nothing but sitting in the dark. But I’m just so angry…   
  
And it doesn’t feel right.

With one look at his face, I know I can’t tell him that. I don’t know what it is inside of me that makes revenge impossible.   
  
“Maybe,” I answer cooly, but it’s not mean, or a even little unkind. “If the world were ending, and you were the last man on earth. Maybe I’ll give you another shot.”   
  
And his mouth twitches into some kind of smile, something a criminal sketch artist would draw on him. A mock-up. But it’s not all fake. The bottoms of his teeth flash in the dark before he takes his cue to leave, padding softly into the hallway and down the stairs.   
  
I guess I haven’t exactly said no.


	3. meltwater

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mulder thinks Padgett may have gotten one thing right about Scully.

I’ve convinced myself, by the time we’ve washed the blood from our skin and I’m swaddled in a baseball jersey and he’s asked me for the tenth or fiftieth time to let him take me to the hospital, that Phillip Padgett simply met me at a damn good time.

  
I can spend the rest of my life in fear of my own lack of foresight, of appropriate caution, or I can admit to myself I’d been vulnerable for a singular moment. Not caught or entrapped or made into somebody’s plaything, but vulnerable like anyone might be, something I have been working on, slowly, like one might approach their fear of heights by climbing the stairs. I fell for his ruse. I wrapped myself around Mulder like a vine, made him pick me from the ground like a sprouted grain to be repotted.

  
And it’s okay.

  
Mulder simply looks at me like he knows something he didn’t before, and it’s alarmingly similar to Padgett’s unceasing gaze. Maybe that’s where the magic had been, the allure. Even now I can’t decide how much he’d really known and how much he just hoped. But what mattered was that he wanted to know me – had written pages and pages about this need of his, and in the fashion of all writers he had only let me see the best parts.

  
Mulder wants me to read the rest. I won’t. I won’t do it. I’m just not like him, I can’t roll around in shame and darkness and expect the anger to keep me alive.

  
Still Mulder stares from the other side of the couch. I do not let myself consider what he thinks he knows about me. I feel it will be unkind.

  
“We need to take my statement down,” I say finally, reaching over to boot up the laptop sitting on the coffee table. The pressure in my chest builds and suddenly I’m out of breath. I feel trapped, a body looms over me, his fingers are freezing they are so cold and calloused and they curl around my racing heart in come-hither sweetness…

  
Fingers. Warm, gentle, uncertain. They curl around my wrist reaching for the table and it drops between us like a bowling ball.

  
“The report can wait, Scully,” he says.

  
It’s hard to realize how much faith I’d lost in him. The trust is there, innately, trust for him to save my life and tell me the truth. But I’m waiting for his jokey cruelty, the clench of his jaw, the flash of a camera so that he may commemorate this moment forever and slip it into the files like a blue ribbon.

  
None of this happens. His fingers tickle my wrist. His face is so tender it’s difficult to look at and I have to fight back nervous laughter. I kissed him once and that was the face he made in return and I still don’t know what it means now and what it meant then.

  
He reaches over the great couch divide and grabs my hand and laces our fingers together. I try to unlock them, shake him off and tell him no, but he tightens his grip and warns me simply with a firm, low utterance of my name.

  
We get my statement down, and he doesn’t drive me to the hospital. He asks me to come into work on a Saturday morning and it’s the first time I’m happy to see him in months.


	4. the thaw

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The world did not end. Mulder is not the last man on earth

People all over the world are crawling into bunkers and snacking on canned beans and bemoaning the arrogance of a species who thought they could erase God. To them the drop of the ball urges on like a ticking bomb; people hug and they shout and they cry with elation while others prepare for the very end. 

Mulder thinks we stopped it from happening. I think we’re off by a year and I’m dreading the drive home in the crowds and the cold with Mulder babbling nonstop about corpse reanimation practices cross-culturally while high on dope. 

The ball drops, paranoid mothers cling to their shaking, confused children. A father is reunited with his motherless child. The ball drops and it’s cold outside and a gentle, excited murmur builds in the hospital like a round of golf-applause. 

The ball drops and I am being kissed. 

This is the third time and it is much softer than the others. Barely there. I think faintly that this constitutes my only sober New Years kiss and that’s probably why I’m not trying to shove my tongue down his throat. 

He pulls back. I can read him completely for once though he’s wearing a look I’ve certainly never seen before. Fox Mulder is proud, and he’s happy, and for perhaps the first time he holds no fear of the impending collapse of the universe. If it does happen he won’t take it personally. For now. 

“The world didn’t end,” he says a little shyly. It didn’t, I assure him. In bunkers there is a collective sigh of relief, or maybe a little disappointment. Someone or a hundred people in New York are getting arrested for public indecency. Inevitably and fate seem so much less important when the whole world’s been given a second chance. 

The world did not end, and Fox Mulder is not the last man on earth. But I give him another chance, too. And another one. And one more…


End file.
